For my money, that was definitely the best episode of Gosick so far. Obviously Victorique was preposterously kawaii, but that’s happened pretty much every week. The difference this time was that the plot finally started to catch up to the character interaction as a driver of interest, and that’s an important milestone. Hopefully they can keep it up.

We start out with Kujo and Avril bonding rather nicely, having a happy day rummaging through a flea market where a strange magician is haplessly trying to entertain the crowd. He ends up taking Kujo’s textbook and exchanging it for a turban-styled hat in a rather borad moment of foreshadowing. There’s also an odd nun at the market, hawking something she calls “The Dresden Plate” – which promptly disappears after a cloud of smoke and a gaggle of pigeons mysteriously appear. Remember that nun, as she’ll be turning up later.

We really start to dig a lot deeper into Victorique’s past this week, starting with the moment when she tries on the hat and Grevil mistakes her for one “Cordelia Gallo”. The really interesting and somewhat unsettling scene occurs when she reads an item about a solstice festival in a small village called Horvitz. This causes her to go into a bit of a daze and trip over Kujo’s foot, and a mysteriously strong reacting to banging her head on the floor. Puzzled by this, he experimentally flicks her (lightly) just to see if she’s a crybaby – and she promptly breaks into tears and tells him she’ll never speak to him again. Long story short, they end up on a train to Horvitz though still not speaking, the nun shows up on the train, and the innkeeper in the village tells them the “Grey Wolves” – talking wolves of legend – will be on the hunt that night. After revealing to him that Cordelia Gallo is in fact her mother, falsely accused of murder, Kujo and Victorique join the Sister and a small group of tourists to the wolves’ village deep in the mountains.

This was really the first time the mystery packed real weight and a sense of menace to it. Whatever secrets Victorique is hiding, there’s a damn good reason why she’s so sensitive to being hit in the face – and it feels as if it could be a rather dark and disturbing story. Of course it might not, but there was some real heft to those scenes – there’s something deeper going on with her and we’re finally going to start digging into it next week. The legend of the wolves is above-average in terms of interest too, and for once it isn’t a piece of cake to predict where everything is going. The interaction between Kujo and Victorique has always been excellent, so if we can fold in a really strong storyline on top of that this show can finally start to vindicate the great potential it radiated from the first preview images.